Salvaging the sails

Writing this post has taken me a great deal of courage. However, as does every day require courage, every hour that I continue to walk this path, towards recovery. Thus, if ‘practice makes perfect’, I have reasoned with myself, that it is okay, and probably a good thing, to write with courage, too.

This is a reflective post, speaking of recognition, sadness, determination, and hope. The metaphorical style helped me to communicate something through words, which I still don’t fully understand myself. Hope whispers to me, that someday I will, and therefore will find myself better equipped to win this battle.

There is a ‘demon’ inside my brain, and it has managed to gain near total command. This demon manifests itself as addiction.

It entered my life, disguised in a mask, performing the role of a ‘friend’, and in the beginning, it played the trick of being helpful. This masked stranger quenched my thirst, my aching, for a temporary release, from all the anguish of what was going on around me, to me, and to others as well.

I know that I need to reclaim my own mind, and wrench back control from the demon. Take back the reigns, upon realising they are no longer in my grasp.

Fear and despair warn me, this demon is going to hurt me, particularly as I begin to fight back. It will scream, kick, and shout at me. All of its might will be thrust forward, in the demon’s attempt to survive.

Clenching, tough onto these reigns, desperate to persist in dominating my head space, leaking poison into my mind and my will, the demon is adamant it shall not relinquish, never let go of the throbbing life source which sustains it. That ‘life source’ being the ‘treasure’, which it found, lurking within the deep waters of my psyche.

The Demon’s treasure chest exists not, as one might expect, in the form of a breakable crate, dripping with Gold, jewels, wealth, prize or happiness. Rather, it is the antithesis of such a positive, glowing beacon. There lies no victory to behold, here, for any good willed explorer.

‘Treasure’ for this demon, was/is in fact the lack of it. It emerged as emptiness, a hollowed out crate, where once harboured self-belief, ambition, hope, faith, volition and will.

When the world around me came to blows, seemed to strip away all I knew about myself, all that comprised my identity, almost everything I held so dear and close. Like a tsunami which washed away my happiness, stole the love of my life, swept away my love for life, crippled my career, and bleached out my livelihood, came the breakdown of my mind. In the aftermath, I felt that all I had left was a tired and tested, faltering soul.

When followed, that violent sexual assault, the breaking of a trust I had so desperately believed in, through dark, vulnerable hours, my soul seemed all but smothered, leaving an empty shell of self, all the light flicked out.

That empty shell is what the demon treasures, the hollow cave, where once sparked my soul- this diminished esteem is what grants the demon it’s dreadful power, power to remain captain of a ghostly vessel. Steering my ship beneath its own sails, towards ever blackening darkness, a watery grave.

And yet my soul remains, as do my sails, and all the fire within me could never be smothered. The demon knows this, and this truth frightens it’s core. Hence it’s rampage. Fearing the fateful inevitable: That once again my soul and my mind will sail the ship. The opportunistc demon shall lie, defeated. Not merely inhibited, completely extinguished.